What does this child’s game teach us about the history of writing? Something basic but
incredibly inventive.
You learned how to write with symbols that stand for words - logographs. And you saw
just how many logographs you need to write well - logographs for everything under the
sun and the moon, including the sun and the moon. But isn’t this getting impractical?
Do we really need a symbol for every word? Surely the madness can’t go on forever!
Say hello to this smart rogue, who’s about to solve your problem with an innocent mistake.
His father has been counting sheep. Literally. And he just asked his son to record a measly
line in his budget: “10 sheep for uncle”. The son writes the 10, and the logograph for
sheep, but uncle? He pauses and scratches his head. Eager to play with his friends,
he writes the character for “ankle”. “10 sheep - ankle”. He hurries away without
a second thought, but don’t take his invention lightly.
If you’ve ever played fill-in-the-blank or guessing games where you have to sound
out picture-words, you’ve seen and used this principle for yourself. But it’s not
just for quirky puzzles with funny solutions.
The name for this is another “Major Moments in the History of Writing”. Ahem, the name
for this is rebus. This familiar language game lets you look beyond the meaning of a
character and use it simply for its sound. Sun sounds like son, and, by extension, perhaps
soon and sown. Logographs, like the symbol for “sun”, could already be read as words.
Now, with the rebus principle in your pocket, logographs can also be read as sounds.
This isn’t just useful for getting ancient uncle his ancient sheep. Once Aztec city planners
finished building their stunning capital in the middle of a lake, the Venice of the New
World, Tenochtitlán, their scribes needed a way to write its name. They’ve been using
what amounts to basic picture writing. Since Tenochtitlán has a stone, “te”, and a
cactus, “nochtli”, it’s natural to write it with two fairly obvious glyphs. Then these
become not just symbols meaning cactus and stone, but symbols for the noises “Tenochtitlán”,
making them just as much rebus fun as those puzzles you solved as a kid. And now you know
the name for those. You also know why there’s a cactus on top of a stone in Mexico’s flag.
It’s not just for show!
How alike does the sound-alike pronunciation have to be? Which sounds can we chop off?
Pit the Egyptians against the Sumerians one more time. Egyptian hieroglyphs cut off the
initial consonant, or, less often, two or three consonants from the original word. Sumerians,
on the other hand, with their cuneiform, take whole syllables. These two paths don’t just
add some local flavor. Rebusing out consonants doesn’t just impact ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.
It leaves a legacy for later spinoffs: the mentality that these are either read as logographs
or they stand for consonants. Cuneiform leaves a different legacy. Completely unrelated languages
will spend thousands of years borrowing and reborrowing cuneiform to write their own words,
but, each time, the symbols are read as logographs or as syllables.
Flexibility is key here. Look at this Egyptian hieroglyph. It can be read as a logograph
for “mouth” (“re”), or as the consonant “r”. This character could be read as the
logograph meaning “house”, or it could stand for the consonants pr, the two consonants
in the Egyptian word. Conveniently, in Egyptian, the little slashy below lets you know when
it’s a pure logograph.
The rebus discovery brings up a tension between meaning and sound. Is writing phonetic or
semantic? Is it about encoding the meaning of words or encoding speech sounds? The old
logographs were fundamentally a meaning-writing system. Sure, this sounds like “re” in
Egyptian, but what’s crucial is that this is the logograph for the word meaning “mouth”.
Rebus writing takes a big step towards sound-writing: this will come to stand for the consonant
“r”, regardless of meaning.
It may come as a surprise, but, once discovered, sound writing doesn’t oust meaning writing.
Not at all!
Indeed, early writers notice that phonetic writing brings up a problem, a problem you
probably missed because of your comfort with sound-writing, a problem that meaning-writing
can solve. Brace yourself, history, because logographs are about to make a comeback!